Exposure To Porn & The Impacts
The American Association of Christian Counselors reported in their course, "Healthy Sexuality" that the next great battle that the church must face is the battle for healthy sexuality. Because of the change in society in many ways it is impacting the nature of human sexuality in every aspect of their nature. Many of the chemicals in the food and in the waters are affecting the physiological components of human while the media and the philosophical paradigms of the day are also changing how society views sex and sexual behaviors.
Children are entering into the puberty at a much earlier time in their lives and are now having to do with sexual sensations much earlier (some at the age of 10-11). Because of the entering into the pubescent stage and the exposure to sexual sensations many children and early or preteens must now gain understanding of the changes in their bodies even though they have not come into an emotion state wherein they truly have the capacity to do so.
One of the most complex problems to deal with is the rise of the internet and the ease of access by which all individuals can connect to it. In doing some research I came across a few sites that gave their estimates of how many pornographic websites exist at present (These numbers do not reflect the correct numbers because site close down and perhaps 7-10 take their place on a daily basis.
Forbes.com sited that in 2010 out of the million or so most popular websites that were visited in the world about 42,337 of those sites were sex related which is approximately 4% of the sites that were visited. The same report from Forbes stated that from July 2009-July 2010 13% of all searches were for exotic content. Forbes author Julie Ruvolo admitted that it is almost impossible to tell how many pornographic websites exist because the internet is so vast. CYBERsitter reported that they blocked 2.5 million adult websites. N2H2 reported that they filtered about 260 million porn sites althought this has not been substantiated.
Phillip Stark in his 2006 studies claimed that there was an average search for porn at about a 6% rate which he claims only 1.5% of those sites were porn although Ruvulo seems to feel this is extremely lower than what they have found or discovered. Ruvulo believes with the studies that they conducted there were 10-15% engine searches that were related to porn searches.
Psychology Today (psychologytoday.comblog) has their own statistics that can be found below.
• In 2015, worldwide, there were more than 2 billion Web searches for porn.
• 20 percent of mobile-device searches are for porn.
• 90 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls are exposed to Internet porn by age 18.
• 56 percent of divorces involve one spouse (almost always the man) having an obsessive interest in online porn.
• Compared with faithful spouses, adulterers are more than twice as likely to be regular viewers of online porn.
Similar statistics come from InternetSafey101/Enough is Enough, which calls itself “the national leader in making the Internet safe for children and families.” According to these folks:
• Porn sites attract more visitors each month than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined.
• 30 percent of Internet content is porn.
• 88 percent of porn contains violence against women.
• From 2005 to 2013, searches for “teen porn” tripled to 500,000 a day.
• Compared with young adults who don’t view violent X-rated material, those who do are are six times more likely to commit sexual assault.
It is again impossible to really tell because not all people will be honest concerning how much porn they truly watch or how many times per day that they visit such sites. The next problem is that what is porn to one individual may not be considered to be porn to another.
In many cases porn creates an unrealistic anticipation for sexual activities. Most porn incites the fantasies that many are afraid to live out or to experiment for many reasons. In a great deal of cases it is not easy to find someone who wants to experiment in sexual activities that are based on fantasies or those desires that may be a little on the wild side although more people than in the past are experimenting in sexual activities. Porn can cause an unrealistic paradigm to be formed in the subconscious mind of those who view it because again porn is produced to provide a visual fantasy and to stimulate the libido of those who watch it so they can keep watching and paying their money. One such problem that was discovered is that many individuals in marriages may become dis-satisfied with normal marital sexual patterns and may desire to incorporate new and unusual activities into their marriage that their spouse may not be comfortable with or even desire. Porn can impact the sexuality of an individual by stimulating both curiosity and latent desires that individuals were not prepared to control. In such a case individuals may become psycho-emotionally attached to new paradigms and desires to find or seek for partners who will accommodate them in their quest to experience new sensations. There are many impacts on the human mind as it relates to sexuality and many research efforts to try to discover those impacts caused by porn that can be found on the internet.
One site (fightthenewdrug.com blog) suggests that porn can rewire the brain as it causes the brain to pump out specific chemicals that may rewire the brain by causing new nerve pathways to be formed.
Uncommen.org reports that the longer a man watches porn the more dissatisfied he becomes with his wife among other problems.
While www.medicaldaily.com reveals that the act of sexual intercourse and watching porn causes the brain to release dopamine in the part of the brain that govern learning and emotions. The brain continues to change if one continues to watch porn because it becomes desensitized to the dopamine and in so doing and the affect is much like alchol and drug addiction. This is the report given by medicaldaily.com:
It is this neurotransmitter that gives you the desire for self-pleasure, as its levels surge in response to anticipation and expectation. But the brain begins to change as we repeatedly tap into this particular pathway by viewing porn — it becomes desensitized to the effects of dopamine. These effects were shown in a 2014 study published in JAMA Psychiatry, which produced the first-ever brain scans of porn watchers. The German researchers found that the level of changes in the brain correlated with the amount of porn a person watched — the more they watched, the lower the activity was in their brain’s reward centers after sexual images were flashed on a screen.
This causes the brain to need more dopamine each subsequent time in order to feel the same effects. As a result, it can give a person a reason to watch more porn. Sometimes, however, the brain gets “worn out” and halts the production of dopamine, which leaves the viewer wanting more satisfaction with the inability to reach it, according to Gary Wilson, a physiology teacher, who discussed the topic during a TEDx talk. This can provoke the viewer to seek out more intense porn to get the same “high.”
“Brains respond to chemical change. When the dopamine is released and there is a sense of pleasure, the primitive brain sends the message to repeat the behavior for the desired feeling,” Schrank said.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/watching-adult-films-alters-brain-activity-similar-drug-addicts-alcoholics-347224
The Reeverian Research Group is developing a study and preparing to publish a report on human sexuality and porn in the near future.
The End
